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Poster: Dan Harkless Date: Sep 17, 2003 2:12pm
Forum: web Subject: Verisign's DNS sabotage will erase old sites in the Internet Archive

I just sent the following mail to info@archive.org. I hope someone's listening!! ---- I greatly hope the administrators of the Internet Archive are following the story of Verisign's deliberate sabotage of the .com and .net DNS space: http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/337926/2003-09-15/2003-09-21/0 As mentioned here: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/16/0034210&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=95&tid=98&tid=99#6973504 because now all formerly nonexistent domain names will resolve, to an IP address that runs a webserver with a robots.txt file that denies all access, the Internet Archive will, by its own policy, remove all historical content of all sites with domain names that are no longer registered! This is easily remedied by either patching the nameservers used by archive.org to work around Verisign's sabotage: http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/337946/2003-09-15/2003-09-21/0 or, less robustly, by modifying the archive's crawling software to recognize the IP address Verisign returns for nonexistent domains (currently 64.94.110.11) and not ever crawl it or look at its robots.txt file. I just hope some action is taken quickly before too much of the archive is lost! -- Dan Harkless http://harkless.org/dan/
This post was modified by Dan Harkless on 2003-09-17 21:12:00

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Poster: Dan Harkless Date: Sep 18, 2003 4:39am
Forum: web Subject: Re: Verisign's DNS sabotage will erase old sites in the Internet Archive

Got an email back from the Internet Archive folks. They're aware of the problem, which is heartening:

----

Hi Dan,

Thanks for the message. We have been hearing from various folks about this issue. We understand it is a problem and are working on various strategys to fix it.

Thank you for your suggestions, its good to know that there are people out there looking out for us.

Take Care,
Astrid
Internet Archive Support